Journalists usually ignore the publication of the first round of Ucas application figures. Too early to tell, they would say. Better wait until January. But last week my fellow hacks fell on the figures for applications in September and October with ravenous interest. They hold the first clues as the effects of the higher tuition fees to be introduced next academic year .

The headlines told us that applications had fallen by more than 9% – and that a worrying gender gap had opened: applications from men were down 7% and from women by 10.5%. But these averages mask some alarming disparities in the way that people of different ages, from different parts of the UK, applying for different courses are being affected. Crucially, when compared with data available elsewhere, they provide the first indications that students from poorer neighbourhoods are being deterred by higher fees. The detailed tables beg some important questions for policy-makers and for university leaders.

The first significant pattern to note is that the application rate has fallen faster among mature students than among 17- to 19-year-olds. The reduction among 18-years-olds, at 2.8%, is well below average. This is hardly a reduction at all when you bear in mind that demographic changes mean that the cohort of 18-year-olds is 1.5% smaller than last year. But a radically different picture emerges as you go up the age range: down more than 13% for 19-year-olds and down almost 23% among a much smaller sample of 30- to 39-year-olds.

Claire Callender, professor of higher education policy at Birkbeck, says this phenomenon has happened before: "This absolutely repeats what happened last time when fees trebled to £3000. The number of applications from mature students fell by 6%." Callender says that the reduction in the number of mature applicants also provides the reason for the gender gap that seems to be opening, because mature students are more likely to be women.

So does the disparity in application rates by age provide a clue as to how low participation groups are responding to higher fees? In other words, are older applicants more or less likely to come from poorer areas? Common sense would suggest yes, but could the Ucas figures be used to begin to provide some hard facts?

I found the answer to this question in data separately available from the Higher Education Statistic Agency (HESA). Tables on the age of students on full time undergraduate courses show that those over 21 are more than 50% more likely to come from low-participation neighbourhoods than young people under 21. The exact figures are 16.4% and 10.3% respectively.

The second set of figures I want to draw your attention to is the table showing regional variations. While applications from candidates in the south-east are down by just over 8%, those from the East Midlands are down by 20% and Yorkshire and the Humber by more than 17%. Early days, I know, but in combination with a fall in mature students, I wonder what implications this could have for the business models of modern universities in these regions.

Modern universities are disproportionately reliant on older students, and they tend to recruit from their localities. If these variations persist into the final figures, modern universities in the East Midlands or Yorks and the Humber could face a double blow. I admit that this is rank speculation given the immaturity of the figures.

When I put these thoughts to Dr Tim Leunig from the LSE, he was sceptical about the possibility of reading much into them at this stage. Leunig says the data on Scottish applicants is an argument for caution: "Scottish students applying to Scotland are down by more than English students applying to England. It's hard to reconcile that with the belief that fees are putting people off applying to university. Indeed, the fall in Scottish students applying to Scottish universities is greater than the fall in Scottish students applying to English universities. Hence, I suspect that this is evidence of a system that is causing delays in applications, rather than a permanent fall-off in applications. That will be entirely compatible with people learning how the new system works."

Professor Neil Shephard who is research director at Oxford-Man Institute, suggests that the gap in the application rates of young and mature students may be down to the difference in the quality of the information that they have received: "One might expect young people to be exposed to more information about how income contingent repayment will work than mature students, so they may be less put off than the mature. My own view is that behavioural effects (how we process information) have big short-run impacts and that rational considerations tend to emerge in the longer term (as we learn from the crowd)".

The difficulty for institutions more reliant on older students is that it could take some years for these "rational considerations" to emerge. The university thinktank Million+, working with the NUS, has launched an inquiry into mature students. It has done its own analysis of the Ucas numbers and produced an alarming statistic. When you screen out the medics, vets and Oxbridge candidates who had to apply by 15 October, the fall in applications from last year is more than 30%.

Tim Leunig and Neil Shephard suggest this is more likely to be a matter of later rather than non-applications. But whatever the final result, my own gut feeling is that we will see a fall of at least 8 to 10%. The problem is that the pain is not going to be evenly distributed. In October, a survey by the Sunday Times showed that applications to City University London had "plunged" by more than 41%, while those at LSE, Warwick and Bath had seen significant increases.

Across the UK, universities must already be preparing for falling or rising numbers of applicants. I have heard reports of one modern university planning staff cuts of up to 30% and the history department at a Russell group member which is expecting the AAB free-for-all to double student numbers. I am anxious to report on institutional level consequences in more detail and urge you to contact (DM) me at @kimcatcheside with any intelligence that you have about planned cuts – or expansions.